Gearing up for Lair Assault

In less than a week DMs will be able to start running Lair Assault at their local stores, starting with Forge of the Dawn Titan. On the off chance you are not familiar with it, a Lair Assault event is like a sessionf of D&D Encounters cranked up to 11; a mega-encounter that does not allow for short rests, takes about 2 hours to wrap up assuming you do not die...and the mortality rate is pegged at about 80% on your first try. To make matters worse, even if you go in for another shot the DM has options to change things up, making it more dynamic and difficult to plan for. This is not for the casual crowd, but for all the power gamers/optimizers/players that love the tactical elements of combat.

Though we do not know what is in the scenario (yet), there is a lot of speculation and planning going on a few forums, mostly to expect creatures with lots of fire-based attacks and lava since, well, one of the achievements glory awards requires that you die in lava.

I have never ran D&D as a competitive game--I normally fudge stuff either way if I think it will add to the overall excitement, or to just keep things moving--so it will be interesting to see how I DM Lair Assault. My plan is to just roll all the dice in the open to "let them fall as they may", as it were. I am curious to see what parties (and Fortune Cards, if any) people are going to bring to the table, especially for groups going for the "one race" glory award. This is definitely something I am going to cover in depth, so expect to see at least a few play reports sometime in September.